''We should get dinner. Fatten you up,'' he says, for once leaving out the nickname he knows I despise.

You’d think after four years he’d eventually stop calling me Twiggy. Or describing me to his friends as ''90 pounds soaking wet with weights in her pockets.'' He likes to ignore the fact that I’ve already broken 100. At least he hasn’t threatened to put me in a tub of lard recently.

I’m reading Walter Benjamin’s ''The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction'' for class, trying to focus on it so I don’t explode about the weight issue.  Just a few more lines to be sure I won’t say anything I know I shouldn’t. ''The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera, as Pirandello describes it, is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror,'' (Benjamin 230).

http://www.inneraltitude.com/blog/?tag=change-thoughts. Nov. 1, 2013.

''I don’t know why you act like I don’t eat. Food is my favorite thing.''

''Yeah, but you must not be eating the right food. Or enough of it.''

''Can we please not talk about my weight again?'' I want to scream. Sometimes I think he’s concerned for my health; other times, it’s like he knows I’m insecure and just wants to poke fun at me. I regret ever telling him about the time my mom called me anorexic. She seemed to think ''anorexic'' and ''underweight'' were synonymous, completely ignoring the fact that I had eaten two plates of dinner in front of her the night before.

''We’ve been over this a thousand times. It’s my metabolism,'' I say instead.

But what I’m thinking is ''Wouldn’t it be nice to be an animal; not a care in the world; no worries about being ‘the right’ size or having ‘the right’ look .''